Just have a think about it

Fact: people don't like thinking. Okay, that's not quite true. Lots of people, myself included, enjoy thinking a great deal. Oftentimes you'll see me staring at some uninteresting point in space, perhaps a wall or the corner of the table or somebody's knee, and I'll have this dead look on my face and my eyes will probably seem glazed over. That's me thinking. It's not infrequently more interesting than talking to other people, depending on who those people are, of course. Even so, though I may claim the contrary, I prefer not thinking to thinking. Of course, you can't stop thinking (if you think you can, you're only lying to yourself); what I mean is that it's much easier to sit and accept something you may be seeing or reading than thinking about it. If not for that fact, it would be significantly more difficult to enjoy a lot of things, such as films, to give only a single example. And hey, there's nothing wrong with sitting back and just saying, yes, I do believe it's perfectly believable to drive a car into a helicopter. If you can't do that, you're going to miss out on a lot of cool stuff.

Be careful, though. That sort of mental relaxation can only be safely enjoyed under certain circumstances, much in the way that physical relaxation can only be safely enjoyed under certain circumstances. To give an example, it would not be overly wise to put on a Hawaiian shirt and board shorts, rub in some sunscreen and sit down on your deck chair when you've only just recently stumbled into an orgy of furious bears. There's a time and a place, is what I'm getting at. The troublesome part of it is that it's much, much less obvious when we should allow ourselves to drop our guard mentally than physically, and because it's so much easier to not think than it is to think, it's tempting to simple drop our guard and leave it dropped, and if worst comes to worst, so what? We'll just deal with that later.

As you can imagine, I don't think that's a terribly bright idea. Leaving your guard dropped can make you susceptible to the machinations of vicious people, and that sort of thing can get people killed. To quote a great man, don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out. That, however, is not the primary subject of this post (perhaps I will address it at another time). What I would prefer to talk about instead is the idea of coming up with your own philosophy, and by 'philosophy' I mean a comprehensive system of belief in regards to your being. I do not recall having written about this before, although I most certainly have spoken to people about it, so if you have heard this before, I most profusely apologise, although perhaps you would like to stay and read a little anyway?

I think it takes a deal of courage to try and form your own philosophy. Of course, having (to some extent, at least) done that, I would be the sort of person to make such a claim, I know, but hear me out. If you want to come up with a philosophy of your own, that means you have to look at everything you have come to know about life and the way the world works, both through you own experience and through what people have told you, and this is harder than it sounds. Imagine reassessing everything that your friends, parents, teachers, leaders, religious figures and so on have told you and being prepared to say no, to disagree, and to try and come up with something different, with solid reasoning behind it. The hubris of it! you might think. To deny the collective wisdom of hundreds or thousands of people before you and to try and replace it with something you might even claim to be superior. To not only turn your back on this sort of societal tradition but to go against it requires serious balls.

You need more than balls though. You can selectively reject what you might previous have believed and instead substituted it with your own thoughts, carefully developed by considering all the possibilities you have considered, and still be a complete moron. Rejection for the sake of rebelliousness is not only intellectually lazy but it is the antithesis of a proper philosophy, which requires the support of logical underpinnings and fundamental principles. That's why nobody respects teenagers who walk around with more metal in their face than a Holden Kingswood and more eye shadow than a cheap hooker (I'm probably going to cop it for that one).

What you need in addition to testicular fortitude is to think, because unsurprisingly, reviewing the fundamental tenets that have guided everything you have ever thought or felt or done and all of the secondary notions that have accompanied them is tough, and that isn't even the whole of the job, because if you reach the frightening conclusion that the arguments used to justify your way of life have some pretty big holes in them that can't be reasonably filled, your going to have to come up with new conclusion to replace them, and those conclusions are going to need some airtight reasoning of their own to support them. Nobody's saying everything has to be an original idea or an original argument, of course, because the fact of the matter is that someone else might already be right about it all, and there's no point punishing yourself for that. The hard part is finding out which people you think are right and adapting their thoughts for your new philosophy.

So let's say you've done all that. It's taken a lot of effort and a hell of a long time, but you finally have a mostly complete philosophy (complete enough to use until the rest of the gaps are filled at least). Congratulations! Job's finally done, eh? Well, no. This is the hardest part of all: teaching yourself to live by your new philosophy. Now, chances are your philosophy is pretty much based on how you were already rolling, so you might not have to change much at all, but if you've done the job right you'll have found yourself needing to make some pretty significant changes somewhere along the line, like having to teach yourself to think or even feel differently than how you used to, and I don't think anybody's going to be stupid enough to tell you that's an easy feat. What it requires is denying yourself the luxury of not thinking virtually all the time until you satisfy yourself that you've changed your habits, and that's the sort of thing that can't be done in a day or month or a year.

Now, maybe you've followed me this far but think I'm just putting on a show, saying how hard it is to do all the stuff I've done and such. Nothing could be further from the truth. What I want to do is try to explain how challenging it is to develop your own philosophy, but also illustrate how fulfilling and ultimately how freeing it is. After all, what greater challenge is there than learning how to live? If you can overcome that challenge, you can certainly overcome any other challenge in your life. After all, that's what your new philosophy is for. So that's why I'd like to take a moment here with this post to urge you guys, as you see in the New Year, to have a go at developing a philosophy of your own. Take it step by step: read some philosophical material you otherwise would have no interest in and evaluate it critically. If you read something that strongly appeals to you, perhaps you could build from that. Just have a think about it.